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National Poetry Month: Pablo Neruda

By Glynn Young 3 Comments

Pablo Neruda was the pen name of Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto (1904-1973), a Chilean poet and diplomat whom Gabriel Garcia Marquez called “the great poet of the 20th century in any language.” The article on him at Wikipedia contains a wealth of information about his life, family, involvement in the Spanish Civil War, embrace and later rejection of Stalinism, the speech he made in Chile in 1948 which forced him into hiding and then exile, and many other facets of his life. The Poetry Foundation also has a good profile on the poet, as does poets.org.

An interesting note: the 1994 Italian movie Il Postino (The Postman) is a story of how a postman’s life is changed when he strikes up a friendship with a poet in exile on Sardinia – and that poet is Pablo Neruda, who indeed spent several years of exile there.

The author of numerous works of poetry, Neruda received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. This poem is taken from 100 Love Sonnets, or Cien sonetos de amor, which Neruda dedicated to his wife, Matilde Urrutia (the poems were translated by Stephen Tapscott and published by the University of Texas Press).

Sonnet LXXIII

Maybe you’ll remember that razor-faced man
who slipped out from the dark like a blade
and – before we realized – knew what was there:
he saw smoke and concluded fire.

The pallid woman with black hair
rose like a fish from the abyss,
and the two of them built up a contraption,
armed to the teeth, against love.

Man and woman, they felled mountains and gardens,
they went down to the river, the scaled the walls,
they hoisted their atrocious artillery up the hill.

Then love knew it was called love.
And when I lifted my eyes to your name,
Suddenly your heart showed me my way.

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Glynn Young
Glynn Young
Editor and Twitter-Party-Cool-Poem-Weaver at Tweetspeak Poetry
Glynn Young lives in St. Louis where he retired as the team leader for Online Strategy & Communications for a Fortune 500 company. Glynn writes poetry, short stories and fiction, and he loves to bike. He is the author of the Civil War romance Brookhaven, as well as Poetry at Work and the Dancing Priest Series. Find Glynn at Faith, Fiction, Friends.
Glynn Young
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Comments

  1. Maureen Doallas says

    April 27, 2011 at 9:32 am

    I think I have almost all the collections available of Neruda’s poetry, including the one you note here. I’ve enjoyed his work since being introduced to it, in Spanish, in grade 7.

    The Nobel site also has excellent info on Neruda.

    Reply

Trackbacks

  1. Take Your Poet to Work: Pablo Neruda | Tweetspeak PoetryTweetspeak Poetry says:
    June 8, 2013 at 3:21 pm

    […] your favorite poet? (Any chance he’s Pablo Neruda?) Wouldn’t it be fun if he would come spend the day with you at work? You could mutter in […]

    Reply
  2. Ode to the Ode | says:
    March 7, 2014 at 8:01 am

    […] wild west wind and Wordsworth’s primal sympathy; you of Pindar and Horace, but also of Neruda, Clifton, Alexander, and Pinsky; we praise you, we glorify you, we…need […]

    Reply

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